This story first appeared in print in 1983, but I read it as a stand-alone and rather exquisite 2014 paperback. It’s small, with a virtual flap cover, a font like a vintage typewriter, and fascinating and gorgeous illustrations (art direction and design by Chip Kidd). 

Translated from Haruki Murakami’s original Japanese by Ted Goossen, it’s a beautiful, mysterious, and sad story. The author has stated that his surreal books appeal to people especially in times of turmoil and political chaos. 

He told the Guardian in 2018: “I was so popular in the 1990s in Russia, at the time they were changing from the Soviet Union – there was big confusion, and people in confusion like my books,” and “[l]n Germany, when the Berlin Wall fell down, there was confusion – and people liked my books.”

It seems completely appropriate then for the 2020s.

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The Strange Library is a short tale about a lonely and passive boy, taken captive by an evil librarian, and his escape with the assistance of some very unusual friends. 

As bizarre as the story and the characters are, it feels psychologically accurate–as when our protagonist worries more about losing his shoes than about the threat of having his brains eaten by his captor. (I know I have fixated on a minor problem while facing a larger one; it’s a very understandable human reaction.)

The story is dreamlike, fantastical, and devastatingly sad. It reminds me a little bit of Borges, a little bit of Kafka, and a little bit of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, in its turn toward the hallucinatory when reality becomes unbearable.

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HOW TO PURCHASE: Amazon

NOVELLA: The Strange Library

AUTHOR: Haruki Murakami

YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 1983

LEAD-IN IMAGE

Book cover, The Strange Library, published by Knopf